1. Field of the Invention
Reference is made to Disclosure Document Number 518,460, Watkins. The invention relates to human sensory training and testing systems. More particularly, the invention relates to sensory training and testing systems focusing upon the development of pre-attentive and attentive vision for the enhancement of the individual's ability to perform specific functions.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Imagine a situation where one of a person's senses, such as the vision from one eye, the hearing from an ear, the smell from a nose, the touch from one hand, has been impaired through damage to the nerves associated with such sense. What if the sense could be improved through use of the other unaffected senses. Imagine further a situation where one eye has better vision than the other. What if the eye with the better vision could be used to train the underperforming eye. The present invention relates to sensory training and testing systems focusing upon the development of the pre-attentive and attentive vision processes. To understand this method, one must first understand the concepts of pre-attentive and attentive vision.
Eagles have exceptionally good visual acuity being able to see a 10-cm long mouse body from a viewing height of hundreds of meters above the ground. This phenomenal vision is, however, constrained to a very small portion of their retina termed the fovea, which provides a detailed, but very limited, field of view. Humans have the same retinal configuration with a central fovea comprised of dense populations of three eye color cone sensors (red, green, and blue).
The eagle does not use its foveal vision to locate its prey though. The foveal vision has too small of a field of view and would be like looking at a large area picture through a soda straw. This task would be analogous to the “Where's Waldo” problem where there is just too much similar looking clutter in the scene to easily locate the one correct object.
Eagles and other binaural predators locate their prey through the use of depth and motion cues observed via the outer portion of retina, instead of trying to find a particular object in the large background terrain area. Motion and depth cues are basically mathematically indistinguishable because they represent a spatial shift of the object of interest against its background. For the case of the motion cues, the spatial shifts are caused by movement of the object against its background in time. With regard to the depth cues, the spatial shifts are a result of parallax between the lines of sight of the predator's two eyes. While for the eagle the dominant cue for looking down on a more or less flat surface is motion, for a lion looking out horizontally over the savanna for prey both motion and depth cues are important (also, the lion may fuse the input cues from its senses in locating prey). Hence, both motion and depth are considered important for predators.
The outer portion of the human retina, and other predators such as the eagle described above, has a much sparser population density of cone sensors and thus can be used to analyze daylight visual information more quickly using a process called pre-attentive vision. Once a depth or motion cue is detected, the eagle moves its fovea onto this area and uses the maximum visual acuity portion of its retina to identify whether the depth or motion cue was caused by an actual prey. This attentive vision processing of the foveal vision though is slower than the pre-attentive vision.
Humans use two distinct types of vision processes. However, humans are not always aware which one they are using at a particular time. The first type of processing is a whole scene interrogation that is termed a “soft focus” in some sports. This is commonly considered to employ “pre-attentive vision”. The second type of processing is a highly fixated view of a portion of the scene in front of them. This highly fixated processing is commonly call “attentive vision” and is used to read signs, for example. What is not well known is that the pre-attentive vision process has a refresh rate that is five times faster than the attentive vision process.
The typical human vision refresh rate (the time required to produce a single mental image from the visual input of a person's foveal region, i.e., attentive vision process) is given as 200 milliseconds, and the stereopsis and depth perception has a limit around 20 arcsec, which is representative of the attentive vision processes. The pre-attentive temporal refresh rate, on the other hand, is typically given as between 25 and 32 Hz or approximately 40 milliseconds, which is five times faster than the attentive vision process. Processing speed is a very important aspect in the search and target acquisition/recognition process. To perform this task efficiently, humans must rely upon the pre-attentive vision process and not attentive vision.
The human vision processes have developed very sophisticated calibration techniques that occur without an awareness of their existence or implementation. That does not, however, mean that humans always have perfect vision and use the correct vision processes to address every vision problem encountered. Humans sometimes use intuition to solve vision problems and actually apply very inefficient methods for their solutions. There have been some attempts in the past to train pre-attentive vision without the knowledge of why the process works. Reading in general is performed as an attentive vision process where the foveal field of view at the typical reading distance of 60 cm has a width of approximately 2 cm. This allows even long words to be completed foveated (placed within the foveal field of view for identification). But humans are very familiar with the spelling of words and only recognition is needed to understand that a string of letters represents a particular word. In fact, humans can recognize strings of words without really identifying the individual words. This is the process that speed reading uses to increase the rate at which humans can derive the meaning from written text. What is not recognized by the users of this approach is that they are using pre-attentive vision that performs recognition vision processes five times faster than the foveal attentive vision identification process.
Based upon the foregoing understanding relating to pre-attentive vision, it is desirable to develop a vision training techniques which improve upon one's ability to utilize pre-attentive vision in an effective manner. The notion, however, that human senses including vision can be trained or enhanced in not novel. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,405,920, for Enhancing the Perceptibility of Barely Perceptible Images, Naomi Weisstein, Inventor, issued in 1983, discusses the use of a computer program to enhance visionary perception of faint images. Additionally, U.S. Pat. No. 5,088,810, for Vision Training Method and Apparatus, Stephen Galanter and Barry Milis, inventors, issued in 1992, involves different types of computer generated therapeutic eye exercise routines to increase performance. U.S. Pat. No. 6,364,486, for Method and Apparatus for Training Visual Attention Capabilities of a Subject, Karlene K. Ball and Kristina K. Berg, inventors, issues in 2002, discloses the use of a computer algorithm to improve attention vision.
Attempts at visual training have been specifically applied in treating dyslexia. Dyslexia is a problem that is related to how the human eyes' imagery is processed. As recent as September 2002, U.S. Pat. No. 6,364,486, for Method and Apparatus for Treating Dyslexia, was issued to Alison Marie Lawson. The Lawson patent is based upon the theory that Dyslexia is the result of unstable focus in one eye. According to Lawson, Dyslexics do not appear to fully use their magnocellular pathways, which are the pathways used in the brain to process fast moving objects. Dyslexia, according to Lawson, can be improved by strengthening of the magnocellular visual pathways through repetition of eye exercises. Lawson, however, fails to understand the true root to the Dyslexics problem and therefore discloses an inefficient remedy to such problem. Dyslexia is a problem associated with the way in which the left or right ordering of numbers or letters is perceived using attentive vision. Pre-attentive vision in a Dyslexic is not affected. Unlike the method disclosed in the Lawson Patent, the present invention describes a method of training Dyslexics using pre-attentive vision to calibrate or correct the problems associated with attentive vision.
Vision training has also been used in relation to sports, specifically baseball players. In an article published in the 2002 edition of the magazine entitled “Coaching Management”, David Hill the author, speaks of training baseball players to be better hitters through vision exercises. Mr. Hill relates on page 18 of his article, how important it is to a baseball player to be able to see the ball before it is hit. Notwithstanding the opinions of Mr. Hill, however, and as stated on page 171 of the book entitled “Keep Your Eye on the Ball”, Robert G. Watts, A. Terry Bahill, W.H. Freeman and Company, 2000. tracking a baseball moving at 100 mph, would require head and eye rotations in excess of 1000 degrees per second; an impossibility. Looking at an object (i.e., keeping your eyes on the ball) is an identification process using attentive vision, and the batter already knows that he is supposed to hit a baseball. The actual task that is needed is to track the path of the baseball in order to be able to swing the bat at the right time and place to be able to solidly contact the ball. This is a search and target acquisition task and not an identification task (requiring attentive vision). So the batter really should not look at the baseball but, rather, the background instead. The batter must use pre-attentive vision instead of attentive vision that simply is not fast enough to be used to follow the fast moving object. The veracity of this observation is easy to justify by way of example. Jugglers who must simultaneously track several objects cannot possibly track all of the objects that are being juggled by looking at them. They look at the background past the objects and are thus able to use the fast response pre-attentive vision to track them all at the same time.
While the concept of sensory training may not be novel, none of the prior art mentioned above, recognizes the value of using pre-attentive sensory perceptions to enhance attentive vision. With this in mind, the proper vision or sensory process or sequence of processes must be applied if one wishes to optimize the performance of a task. Furthermore, it is known that human vision can be efficiently trained if it is routinely exposed to the proper visual input for performing the process required for a particular task. In fact, some vision defects can also be cured or mitigated by altering the visual input to the eyes or training the eyes with the proper visual input images. Use of other senses such as hearing, smell and touch can be uses to strengthen the foregoing. The present invention overcomes the shortcomings of the techniques discussed above and provides an effective and efficient vision and sensory training and testing technique.